Reassembling a C8 Corvette Easy Like Sunday Morning
After its former owner attempted to build a kit car upon its bones, Detroit’s Pacific Motors rebuilds C8 Corvette enough to do a burnout!
The C8 Corvette is truly a special car. With the big V8 finally in its rightful place behind the cabin, the new ‘Vette roars across the highway on a whole new level. And that’s before the likes of the Z06, E-Ray, and other varieties hit the road in this new era of performance.
And yet, the C8 Corvette is built like a Camaro or Silverado. It’s a mass-market ride, not some one-off or few-off bespoke machine from elsewhere. Thus, it should be easy to assemble in the factory. Or, in this case, reassemble in a shop. Jalopnik‘s David Tracy recently visited Detroit’s Pacific Motors, where an attempt to turn the new ‘Vette into a kit car became an opportunity to see things that would go otherwise unnoticed.
“This car was purchased by some folks who planned to turn it into a kit car,” said Tracy. “Kind of its own supercar. They stripped the whole thing down, and decided, ‘Oh. This is gonna be way too difficult. It makes more sense to go with a custom frame.”
Thus, the shop owner, Darko Stojanovski, bought the now-disassembled C8 Corvette to put it all back together with a few friends. The goal for the moment? Get it running for a few passes and burnouts in the street next to Stojanovski’s shop, itself a treasure trove of supercar parts.
One of the things definitely to go unseen is the cooling system running through the tunnel between the two seats. That tunnel, as Tracy explains, is also quite large for the two skinny cooling pipes housed within. Turns out the extra room is likely for a lithium-ion battery pack in a future C8 Corvette. One with electric all-wheel drive, if the close-out panels on the front knuckles are any indication.
And of course, there’s the LT2 V8 itself. A masterpiece now uncovered, everyone can see the dry sump tank placed in front of the V8. The exhaust is mounted upon upturned headers, and the air filter is housed within a big, black plastic enclosure. The entire thing resides upon a subframe which easily mounts to the chassis with just a handful of large bolts.
The whole process is a revelation, one captured not only by Jalopnik, but by Detroit custom shop Mobsteel Detroit. If anyone wanted to know what a C8 Corvette would look as a kart, the below video should suffice. Strojanovski still has more work ahead, of course. It’s not often, though, one gets to see just what it takes to make this car what it is.
Photos: Jalopnik/David Tracy
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